In the third quarter of last year’s N.B.A. All-Star Game, the East team’s six-foot-eleven-inch forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who, proportionately speaking, may have the longest wingspan of any human being on earth, led a four-against-one fast break. The lone defender was the West’s Stephen Curry. Next to Antetokounmpo, Curry, at six feet three inches, looks something like the rest of us would, which is to say, very small. Rather than encouraging Curry to play defense, his teammates shouted at him to get out of the way, so that he’d avoid becoming a visual punch line in a video that might travel the world through social-media moments later. As Antetokounmpo began to rotate his arm and leap in the air in order to unleash an exclamatory windmill dunk, Curry dropped to the floor, lay face down, closed his eyes, and covered his ears. The moment was the best the N.B.A. All-Star Game has to offer nowadays: broad, physical comedy.

Once a showcase for what the best N.B.A. talent could collectively create in at least the semblance of a competitive environment, the All-Star Game, which this year takes place Sunday night in Los Angeles, has completely devolved over the last decade into a revolving door of defenseless alley-oops and dunks. Until 2013, the most points scored in an All-Star Game was 155, but that came in a game that went into double overtime in 2003. In the last four years, the winning team has scored more than 160 points. In the last two years, it’s scored more than 190. The game is the intended centerpiece of an All-Star Weekend packed full of assorted competitions and celebrity events, but it’s become a ridiculed afterthought. This year, in an attempt to revive interest in it, the league changed the team format. The player in the East and the West who received the most fan votes became team captains and then, playground style, picked the squads. The league also doubled the payouts to this year’s winners, from $50,000 to $100,000. Whether or not these changes will affect the way the game is played remains to be seen. But it’s the league’s initial attempts to inspire the return of a long-established culture of competitiveness at one of its flagship events.

Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks slam dunks as Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors lies on the court during the NBA All-Star game, 2017.

From AP/REX/Shutterstock.

“I know there’s always griping that players in All-Star Games deliberately don’t play defense, but that wasn’t true for us,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was selected to play in 19 All-Star Games from 1970 to 1989, wrote in an e-mail last week. By way of example, Abdul-Jabbar cited the 1983 edition. After watching Marvin Gaye sing the pre-game national anthem (what Bill Simmons, founder of The Ringer, would later call, “the best moment in All-Star history, hands down”), an inspired Abdul-Jabbar started the game by blocking two layup attempts by Julius Erving, arguably the greatest offensive player the sport has ever known. Abdul-Jabbar still holds the record for most blocks in an All-Star Game, with six, which he set in 1980. There have been six blocks total in the last three All-Star Games.

In Abdul-Jabbar’s day, the prize money, too, was demonstrably different than it is today, as was the value of it to the players. In the early 70s, players on the winning side earned at most a couple thousand dollars, the losers a little bit less. But the difference mattered, Abdul-Jabbar said, “because I remember [Phoenix Suns forward] Connie Hawkins once saying, ‘Don’t mess with my money.’”

Of his approach to the All-Star Game in general, Abdul-Jabbar said, “I played to win, but I also wanted to look good doing it.”

In the early 80s, Isiah Thomas, later a two-time All-Star-Game M.V.P. and now an analyst for N.B.A. TV, began to conspire with his All-Star-Game opponent Magic Johnson to take Abdul-Jabbar’s approach to the next level. At the time, the N.B.A. was trying to find its footing with the American public after its merger in the mid-70s with the A.B.A., a league that played a more flamboyant style of basketball than the N.B.A. In advance of the games, Thomas and Johnson would meet to try to orchestrate a form of entertainment that would captivate its audience.

“We understood [that] in order to expand our game we had to bring in more people and more fans,” Thomas said in a phone interview last week. “There was a partnership between the players and the league and the sponsors to come to this venue, on this day, and put on a great, entertaining show, to give [the fans] something that they won’t see during the course of a regular-season game.”

“The creativeness of your imagination had to come into play,” Thomas continued. “But for your imagination and creativity to come into play, you needed the opponent to be competitive. You needed to do it against real defense.” This, Thomas acknowledged, “was well thought out. It was planned.” And it worked.

The N.B.A. became nationally respected for putting on an All-Star Game more entertaining than its counterparts in the three other major American sports. Sportswriters used words such as “electric” and “enthralling” to describe the games. In the 90s, Michael Jordan carried the torch lit by Thomas and Johnson after their retirements. “Everyone is very much aware of [Jordan’s] competitiveness and his desire to win at all times,” said Grant Hill, now a basketball analyst for TNT who played in seven All-Star Games during his N.B.A. career, including six in a row from 1995 to 2001. “That, in some ways, set the tone. . . . It was definitely, ‘Let’s compete. Let’s go after these guys. . . . Let’s win the money that the winning team gets.’” (In 1996, a player on the winning team earned $7,000; one on the losing side earned $5,000.)

Left, by Robert Kozloff/AP/REX/Shutterstock; right, from AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Around this time, what the All-Star players considered entertainment during the weekend began to change, and to move beyond the sport. In 1994, the season that Jordan temporarily traded in his basketball high-tops for baseball cleats, the Orlando Magic’s center Shaquille O’Nealplayed a concertwith his rap group, Shaq Diesel. The performance provided O’Neal the opportunity to promote the imminent release of the film Blue Chips, in which he starred alongside his teammate and future All-Star, Penny Hardaway.

In the ensuing years, the N.B.A. ballooned into a global business—nearly 25 percent of the league’s players currently are born outside the United States; last year’s All-Star Game reached more than 200 countries via TV and digital feeds. All-Star Weekend has grown with it. In addition to the All-Star Game itself, the weekend features a skills challenge, a game among first- and second-year players, a celebrity game, and several other events. “Like anything in entertainment, you keep upping the bar,” Hill said. “The event has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. The production value, the entertainment, the halftime performances, the player introductions, the staging, they’re a lot more elaborate and sophisticated.”

“When you look at it now, the game has shifted more toward entertainment as opposed to being competitive,” Thomas said. “But what made the game so special is the combination of the two. . . . [There’s] a lack of oral history being passed down to the players in terms of the significance of the All-Star Game and the need to compete in it.”

In some ways, the All-Star Game has become a victim of the league’s success. If recent editions have proven one thing, it’s that for the players of the current generation the game has close to no import at all. It’s hard to blame them. There’s certainly less of a need for them to perform in order to sell the product the league offers. It’s already been sold. The question that remains is not so much if the players can tap into what the game signified in the past. It’s if they can find any meaning for it in the present.

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